Deluge/comet entry

Born in Brighton, England, in 1939, Brian Blanchflower immigrated to Perth in West Australia 1972, and has since then established himself as one of Australia's most significant abstract painters. In 1983-84 Blanchflower returned to England on an Australia Council residency and produced a series of sublime paintings inspired by the work of English romantic painters and Leonardo da Vinci's 'Deluge' drawings, but also his interest in astronomy and natural disasters. In 'Deluge/comet entry' Blanchflower has visually allegorised unseen and powerful forces within the natural world and universe - space, matter, and energy all in extreme flux. Completed over a period of 3 months at Air & Space Studio in London, Blanchflower's 'Deluge/comet entry' is a sprawling work made up of violently daubed paint and pastel on un-stretched canvas. It was described by Blanchflower at the time as: 'a world disintegrating … a world of natural forces - wind, water, volcanic eruption, the intervention of outside forces in the form of a comet. Organic forms and man-made structures are breaking up, melting, being re-generated by material from space … Tsunami, Krakatoa, the Tunguska asteroid' [1].

1. Brian Blanchflower quoted in Inundations: recent paintings by Brian Blanchflower, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1985, p 6